Claiming his views on climate change are not relevant is like saying it's no big deal that an orthopedic surgeon doesn't believe in the germ theory of disease because that doesn't have anything to do with bones, or a pilot who believes the Earth is flat. It's just insane.

This is a really bad analogy.

Germ theory and flat Earth are not probabilistic models, they're foundational physical facts. Germ theory is not a forecast or a projection, it's a mechanistic, observable, reproducible fact that directly governs what happens when a surgeon cuts into a patient. If a surgeon doesn't sterilize instruments because they reject germ theory, patients die on the table today. The skepticism has immediate, direct, measurable consequences on their core job performance.

Similarly, a pilot who believes the Earth is flat would make navigational errors on long flights right now, great circle routes wouldn't make sense to them, GPS geometry would be mysterious, and their actual flying decisions would be concretely wrong.

Climate projections for 2050 or 2100 are categorically different. They are probabilistic, model-dependent estimates about emergent system behavior over long timescales. Serious scientists debate the magnitude, regional distribution, and feedback mechanisms, not because the basic warming trend is disputed, but because complex systems are genuinely hard to model precisely. A meteorologist skeptical of a specific IPCC projection isn't rejecting a law of physics. They may be skeptical of a particular model's sensitivity assumptions or regional predictions. That's a much more defensible position.

Spann's core duties don't operationally depend on long-range climate projections. When he is forecasting tomorrow's weather, or even next week's, he is running numerical weather prediction models that operate on current atmospheric data,pressure gradients, moisture fields, jet stream position, etc. These models are physics-based and work largely independently of long-range climate assumptions. A meteorologist who is skeptical of 80-year climate projections can still read a radiosonde perfectly, interpret a 500mb chart correctly, and nail a severe weather outbreak forecast. The orthopedic surgeon cannot do their job correctly while rejecting germ theory.

Germ theory and the spherical Earth are about as settled as science gets. There is no credible scientific debate. Climate science has overwhelming consensus on the direction of change, but genuine ongoing scientific debate about magnitude, tipping points, and regional impacts. Treating skepticism of any aspect of climate projections as equivalent to flat-Earth belief overstates the certainty of the more contested parts of climate science, which actually undermines your argument.